View of 1,400-acre Robena Mine site Greene County Pennsylvania future hyperscale data center campus

Project Hummingbird Models the Hyperscale Power Island

Solar, Storage and VPPs| Electrification Economics at the Property Level
May 06, 2026•6 min read

By Keith Reynolds | Publisher & Editor, ChargedUp!

Home | All Stories

In Greene County, Pennsylvania, a 1,400-acre site on the former Robena Mine property is becoming the operational template for what cellular power architecture looks like when it is built rather than theorized. International Electric Power III (IEP), an independent power producer with more than seven gigawatts of generation experience, is developing the data center campus under the project name Project Hummingbird. The facility will be powered by 944 megawatts of behind-the-meter natural gas combined cycle combustion turbines, supplemented by battery energy storage, and backed up by an existing interconnection with the electric grid. Operations are expected to begin in the first quarter of 2029.

Essential Utilities, the Pennsylvania-based publicly traded utility holding company (NYSE: WTRG), announced a $26 million investment in the project. Through its Aqua subsidiary, Essential will design, build, and operate an 18 million gallons per day (MGD) water treatment plant drawing raw water from the adjacent Monongahela River to support both power generation and data center cooling. Through its Peoples subsidiary, the largest natural gas utility in Pennsylvania, Essential will provide gas consulting and energy management services. The project has secured manufacturing slots for the gas turbines with delivery expected in 2028.

Why This Site Looks Like the Future

The Greene County project is not a data center with onsite generation. It is a self-contained power and water utility that happens to host computing load. The distinction matters because it inverts the relationship between the asset and the grid. In the conventional model, a data center is a tenant of the regional transmission system, dependent on the host utility for both capacity and reliability. In the Project Hummingbird model, the campus generates its own primary power, treats its own water, and uses the grid only as backup. The grid is the redundant resource, not the primary one.

That is the operational definition of cellular power architecture. The campus is a self-balancing energy cell with sufficient internal generation and storage to meet its own load. The grid connection exists for resilience, not for daily operation. If the grid fails, the campus continues to operate. If the campus has surplus generation, it can export to the grid. The energy balance is resolved locally first, with the grid serving as the higher-level fallback.

That structure is what the European VDE engineering association has championed as the most stable path toward a high-renewable grid. The Greene County implementation is gas-fired rather than renewable-fired, but the architecture is identical. What is being demonstrated is the structural model, not the fuel source. The next iteration on similar industrial brownfield sites can substitute solar plus storage, hydrogen, or small modular reactors without changing the underlying cellular logic.

The Speed-to-Power Calculus

The reason Project Hummingbird and projects like it are being built behind the meter rather than through conventional grid interconnection is straightforward: the PJM Interconnection queue cannot deliver 944 MW of new load on any timeline that matches the AI infrastructure buildout. PJM transmission planning cycles run multi-year. New generation interconnection studies extend further. For a hyperscaler willing to commit billions in capital expenditure to a campus that needs to be operational in 2028 or 2029, the regional transmission system is not a viable primary energy source.

Behind-the-meter colocation bypasses the queue. The generation is built on the same site as the load. The interconnection that matters is the one between the gas turbine and the server rack, not the one between the campus and the regional grid. IEP and Essential have public-facing relationships with hyperscalers that make this calculus explicit. Essential previously informed investors that the company was in active discussions with data center developers representing more than five gigawatts of additional power demand across its service area.

Why the Real Estate Frame Matters

Project Hummingbird is being built on a former coal mine site. That is not coincidental. The Robena Mine property has the land area, the proximity to natural gas pipeline infrastructure, the water access from the Monongahela River, and the dark fiber connectivity that hyperscale projects require. It also has the absence of residential adjacency that lets a 944 MW gas plant clear environmental review. Brownfield industrial sites with similar attributes are being identified across western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, southwestern Virginia, and other former extraction zones in PJM territory.

Pittsburgh Magazine reported that Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources has announced a separate $17 billion South Mon plant at an unspecified site in southwestern Pennsylvania. Talen Energy plans to build a data center and a power station in Montour County. A Dauphin County golf course was sold for $45.6 million for conversion to a data center. The pattern is clear. Industrial real estate with the right combination of land, water, gas access, and grid backup is being repriced upward by hyperscaler demand.

For owners of similar industrial sites elsewhere in PJM, the Project Hummingbird structure is now a comp. A 1,400-acre brownfield with gas pipeline access and a water source within a high-capacity dark fiber corridor is no longer marginal industrial land. It is potentially a hyperscale power campus site, valued accordingly.

The Cellular Architecture Implication for Smaller Properties

Project Hummingbird is gigawatt-scale. The cellular architecture it models scales down. A logistics campus, a manufacturing complex, a hospital, a university, or a mixed-use development can each be designed as a smaller energy cell with onsite solar, battery storage, optional combined heat and power, and a grid backup connection. The same structural logic applies. Local generation meets local load first. Storage smooths the mismatch. The grid handles surplus and shortfall.

What Project Hummingbird demonstrates is that the cellular model is not theoretical. It is being built at the largest industrial scale in PJM territory, by a credit-rated utility with a $26 million investment commitment and a publicly traded counterparty signing offtake agreements. The model has cleared the financing test, the engineering test, and the regulatory test. The remaining question for smaller commercial property owners is not whether the architecture works, but at what scale and on what timeline it pencils for their portfolio.

The Underwriting Translation

Three implications for owners of industrial and large commercial real estate. First, brownfield sites with gas pipeline access, water resources, and dark fiber are now potentially repriceable as hyperscale campus sites rather than legacy industrial parcels. Second, the cellular model is the dominant architecture for projects that cannot wait on the regional transmission queue, which means commercial sites of any scale that can support behind-the-meter generation will increasingly do so. Third, the regulated utility is becoming a partner rather than just a delivery channel. Essential's $26 million investment in Project Hummingbird signals that gas and water utilities are positioning themselves as project equity participants in the distributed generation buildout, not just consumers of it.

FERC opened a review earlier this year on the rules governing colocated large loads and behind-the-meter power plants in PJM. The outcome will shape how aggressively this model can be replicated. For now, the projects that have already cleared procurement and announced construction are proceeding. Project Hummingbird is one of them.

Sources

Project Hummingbird Greene Countybehind-the-meter generationcellular power architecturehyperscale data center powerEssential Utilities IEP
Back to Blog